Categories: Yesteryear

From the ’20s to the ’50s a streamlining craze swept the world. Inspired by the rise of the airplane and driven by the need for more efficient vehicles, automakers and dreamers around the globe began sculpting cars into aerodynamic forms with beautifully sweeping lines. Here, we’ve rounded up 12 of our favorite designs from the golden age of streamlining.…

What happened in 1947 when Life Magazine asked comic strip artists to draw their famous characters while blindfolded? From the looks of the second illustration in each pairing below, some incredibly mixed results.…

Orson Welles has a varied reputation depending on who you ask. He lived many lives. Some cite his egotism and success as a Broadway theater director during the Depression. Others mention his War of the Worlds broadcast which, according to legend, scared the living daylights out of the American people and convinced many that they were truly being attacked by aliens. Some cite his genius directorship of the ‘greatest movie ever made,’ Citizen Kane. Finally, others mention his uneven and difficult later years; his battles with studios, his ads for California wine and weight gain, and his lack of finished projects.…

A lot of the world has changed in the past 100 years, but a lot has stayed the same too. Dutch photographer Frits de Beer has re-shot the locations of a vintage film featuring his home city, Alkmaar as it appeared a century ago in 1914. This simultaneous glimpse at the past and present reveals just how much things have remained the same for certain places in the world – especially when it comes to architecture.…

This is a mashup of layered iconography if we’ve ever seen one. Multimedia producer and writer Eisen Bernard Bernardo has been superimposing modern magazine covers on classical paintings. Here the figures in paintings from the likes of Boticelli, Picasso and Waterhouse are mashed up with modern covers featuring current stars like Miranda Kerr, Penelope Cruz and Pharrell.…

Separated by nearly a century of time and half a world apart, Australian artist Jane Long has re-imagined the vintage portraits of Romanian photographer Costica Acsinte in a highly fantastic fashion. A war photographer and pilot during the First World War, Acsinte opened a studio in Slobozia where he created thousands of glass plate photographs. Those images are now being digitized and added to the Flickr Commons, where Long found them and gave them new life.…

Happy 4th of July America! In a celebratory visual fashion we think you’ll enjoy this fascinating look at the history of the old Stars and Stripes through history… in fact, back to before it was even the Stars and Stripes at all.

This patriotic print from Pop Chart Labs traces the flag through 48 versions, beginning with the star-less “Rebellious Stripes” of 1767 and finishing with the 50-star flag we’ve flown since 1960 (too bad for people who bought the 49-star version of 1959). You’ll definitely want to check out the zoomable view of this poster here.…

Just the mention of “sand bottle art” conjures up images of school projects with florescent dyed sand and invariably abstract designs… but these bottles by Andrew Clemens (1857-1894) are different. He is credited as the inventor of this rare art form and perhaps took it as far as is possible. He was known at “the portrait painter without a brush or paint.”…

It seems that we have been dreaming of flying cars for decades. From Back to the Future to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, our popular imagination keeps revisiting the fantasy of automobiles joyously soaring in flight, completely liberated from roads and traffic. While his series is a trick of photography rather than a reality, Swedish artist Jacob Munkhammar gives us another glimpse of what it might look like if cars could fly. …